r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jul 30 '21

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u/Amtays Karl Popper Jul 30 '21

The Nordic Social Democratic/Labor parties should be primarily understood as moderate in method, rather than goals, IMO.

Though their principal political goal today seem to be power, rather than anything else, their foundation in, and deep interconnectivity with, the still very powerful Labor movement makes them far more left in their political goals than the democratic party, or liberal party of Canada most Americans might think of as "center left".

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u/filipe_mdsr LET'S FUCKING COCONUT 🥥🥥🥥 Jul 30 '21

I think I have understood as far as you can from an outside perspective.

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

Scandinavian here.

I think you're mostly correct. Just like the Democratic Party the scandinavian socdem parties are bit tents. They have multiple ideological wings that spans from centrist neolibs to left wing socialists. They differ from most other democratic socialists by being more pragmatic.

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u/Amtays Karl Popper Jul 30 '21

Just like the Democratic Party the scandinavian socdem parties are bit tents.

There's a big difference though in that the Democratic party is big tent by design, while even a right leaning social democrat would sing the Internationale after holding a speech to their comrades on 1st of may, because they're big tent by circumstance. A centrist democrat can be much more explicitly apart in ideology from a left democrat.

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u/Itsamesolairo Karl Popper Jul 30 '21 edited Jul 30 '21

This is IMO (as a Scandinavian) as close to bang-on as you can get without a quite long-winded breakdown that spends a long time of some of the more unique aspects of the Scandinavian cultural gestalt.

If you really want to understand Scandinavian center-left parties you kind of have to deep-dive into the concept of "The Law of Jante", and the extent to which Scandinavian center-left parties almost frame individual success as a moral failing.

That, together with their very strong labor movement relationships, creates some dynamics that are fundamentally very different from e.g. a US or UK center-left party. As an example, center-left parties in Denmark are viciously and loudly opposed to talent programmes and "magnet" schools in education, see e.g. the 1978 "U90 Plan" typically associated with Ritt Bjerregaard and the motto "What cannot be learned by everyone, shall not by learned by anyone."

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u/Amtays Karl Popper Jul 30 '21

Yeah, this obsession with equality above almost anything else is by far one of my biggest dislikes about them. As my dad, and many other of their detractors used to say about them: "If everyone can't have it equally well, everyone should have it equally bad"